Efficiency vs. effectiveness, episode 476

During the holidays, a project manager leaves a voice mail for this IT pilot fish: The PM is having problems connecting to the Internet with his company-issued laptop while he's away from office.

"He says this has been going on for some time, and it's causing him problems updating his projects from remote locations," says fish. "He really wants us to fix this once and for all so he can do his work remotely."

PM has left his laptop hidden in fish's cubicle, complete with passwords on a sticky note inside the lid. Fish boots it up, logs onto the laptop and then logs in as "workstation only" so he can start troubleshooting.

Trouble is easy to find: A window pops up almost immediately, reporting that changes have been made in the start-up process.

Fish reviews the start-up applications. Turns out the PM has disabled all but one.

He reactivates several of the apps he knows are important, then reboots. The same message comes up, but that's no surprise; fish knows he hasn't reactivated all the start-up apps.

He starts to open up the network properties to check for problems there -- and gets an error message telling him the network connection service has been disabled.

In fact, fish discovers to his astonishment that all but four or five services have been disabled. "I couldn't believe the laptop was functioning, let alone displaying anything," fish says.

"Because I needed to back up some data files prior to reimaging the laptop, I had to go through and enable most of the services just so I could get plug-and-play, removable disks and other functions to work properly.

"I called the user and informed him that he couldn't be making major changes like that on his laptop and expect us to fix it in a short time.

"He said he was just following the instructions the technician gave him over the phone the last time he had this problem: 'He said to disable one item at a time to see if it would resolve the problem. I just decided to simplify the process and disable all of them!'

"I don't think this PM will be disabling any more services or applications."

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